Overview

ISO 14000 is a series of international standards for environmental management, measurement, evaluation, and auditing. It is especially important for export-based organizations and companies whose operations have an impact on the environment.

ISO 14001 can be used as a guide to upgrade your company's present environmental management system in accordance with an internationally recognized set of requirements.

Benefits

ISO 14000 is also proven to reduce risk and liability for companies, while increasing efficiency and corporate image. Some of the perceived – and actual – benefits experienced by certified companies may include:

Internal Benefits:

• Improvement in overall environmental performance and compliance.
• Provide a framework for using pollution prevention practices to meet EMS objectives.
• Increased efficiency and potential cost savings when managing environmental obligations.
• Promote predictability and consistency in managing environmental obligations.
• More effective targeting of scarce environmental management resources.
• Enhance public perception with outside stakeholders.
• Fewer accidents, errors and penalties.
• Reduction of costs associated with emissions, discharges, waste handling, transport, and disposal.
• Savings from safer workplace conditions.

Environmental Benefits:

• Minimizes hazardous and non-hazardous waste.
• Conserves natural resources – electricity, gas, space, and water with resulting cost savings.
• Prevents pollution and reduces wastage.

Competitive Benefits:

• Increase in process yields.
• Addresses the requirement to compete in international markets.
• Less downtime through more careful monitoring and maintenance.
• Improved utilization of by-products.
• Conversion of waste into commercially valuable forms.
• Savings from safer workplace conditions.
• Improvements in the product as a result of process changes. Higher quality, more consistent products.
• Demonstrates the company’s environmental responsibility to shareholder groups.
• More efficient resource use.
• Increased competitiveness.
• Possible reduction in need for multiple on-site audits by regulatory agencies.

Marketing Benefits:

• Proof of environmental responsibility to business partners, regulatory agencies, and community.
• Meets potential national and international government purchasing requirements.
• Delivers profits from marketing "green" products.
• Provides a competitive marketing tool.
• Improves international competitiveness.

Financial Benefits:

• Improves the organization’s relationship with insurance companies.
• Elimination of costs associated with conformance to conflicting national standards.
• Reduced energy consumption.
• Process cost savings by reduction of material and energy input.
• Satisfying investor / shareholder criteria.
• Helps reduce liability and risk.
• Improved access to capital.

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The Challenge

Protecting the environment is important. It not only helps create a brighter future, it also shows you are a responsible business, earns the trust of customers, and earns compliance with regulatory requirements.

The following issues may impact a company in its registration efforts:

• Understand EMS language and requirements.
• Identify and evaluate the environmental risks associated with each site operation.
• Objectively determine the significance of each environmental aspect in order to prioritize the actions necessary in the environmental management programs.
• Limited resources – when asked, most companies will normally identify money, personnel, and time as their most problematic resources.
• Understand and stay-ahead of, the various laws and regulations that apply and determine the measures that must be taken to comply with them.
• Conduct a gap analysis against the EMS to rate certification readiness to ISO 14001.
• Distribute procedures to all employees while ensuring security of the information and the users.
• Plan all of the environmental tasks while enabling follow-ups by employees, managers, or corporate headquarters.
• Supporting cultural change throughout implementation.
• Difficulty in adoption and standardization of EHS initiatives across the organization.
• And many others…

All of these are significant challenges. However, the implementation and registration of a management system helps an organization achieve continuous performance improvement.

To deal with all these challenges an integrated and automated management system can certainly be of great help.

ISOSYSTEM provides organizational efficiency, process control, and flexibility to help simplify the tasks involved in managing data and information. It will also help your organization make better decisions in managing the content and process that drive your business.

ISOSYSTEM suite is an integrated, configurable, and easy-to-use software solution especially designed to facilitate adherence to ISO quality standards. ISOSYSTEM can help meet key ISO 14000 requirements and at the same time increase efficiency and keep compliance costs down.

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SE Suite Compliance Mapping

Each ISOSYSTEM module addresses key compliance issues as shown below:

ISOSYSTEM Module	ISO 14000 Compliance and Requirements
SE Waste	Provide consistency and accuracy through standardized waste profiles. Ensure streamlined waste management information organization-wide. Effortlessly track your waste inventories, including accumulation, storage, containers, and lab packs.
SE Document	Manage the creation, review, approval, and distribution of documents. Control of entire life cycle creation, review, approval, publishing, e-mail notification, change request, and archiving. Prevent unintended use of incorrect documents and ensure only the latest document versions are used. Automated document protection and retention rules. Enterprise-wide involvement in the change process.
SE Action	Manage corrective action from environment audit. Monitor emission violations. Manage material and process nonconformance, internal corrective actions, preventive actions and root cause analysis, audits, and other regulatory process. Provide customizable reporting capabilities to help managers monitor entire quality management life cycle. Consistent corporate-wide approach for reporting all environmental, health & safety nonconformance. Keep records of defects, the investigation of their cause, and the corrective actions. Problem causes are identified and registered.
SE Audit	Prepare and maintain audit checklists for procedures, process, departments etc. Create audit profiles for any area or process, detailing the frequency and responsibilities for audit. Create and progress audit reports. Create and manage non-conformances and corrective actions associate with audits.
SE Competence	Identify training needs. Determine the necessary competency for personnel. Maintain appropriate records of education, training, skills, and experience, include the acknowledgement of training associated with management system updates.
SE Calibration	Control and check calibration equipment periodically. Monitor calibrates instruments (procedures and status indicators). Log all items of equipment held, together with basic asset information. Ensure no unregistered or overdue equipment is used. Plan and record periodic calibrations. Manage all maintenance, calibration, repair, and other activities associated with capital equipment. Document calibration steps for each piece of equipment.
SE Maintenance	Keep records of all maintenance work. Ensure unique identification of each piece of equipment. Keep records of equipment calibration and maintenance. Provide maintenance schedule to ensure no equipment is overlooked. Maintain corporate-wide maintenance, measurement, and monitoring data in a centralized system. Establish a consistent approach for managing workflow processes. Allow organizations to manage corporate-wide data about equipment maintenance.
SE Risk	Create risk and control assessment. Report risk information consistently across your business. Identify uncertainty (risk and opportunity). Provide instant dashboard visibility of corporate-wide risk performance data. Provide risk environment classification. Manage the actions associated with Risk Assessments. Provide instant and automatic reporting of key metrics.
SE Performance	Provide instant dashboard visibility of enterprise-wide environmental compliance. Report easy, intuitive, and flexible key performance indicator. Reduce the time and cost involved in data collation and performance reporting. Traffic light indicators display real-time progress.
SE SPC	Verify acceptability of process capability and product characteristics. Ensure that required characteristics of processes and products are monitored and measured. Document procedures to implement and control the statistical techniques identified. Ensure action plans are taken when out-of-control signals are detected.
SE Project	Ensure projects are initially planned then approved. Estimate initial project time, costs, and deliverables. Identify, document, review, and approve all project changes and modifications. Ensure critical path assessment. Keep record of all project meetings. Ensure project tasks are performed and verified.
SE Process	Ensure production (and installation) processes are defined, planned, and documented. Production shall be carried out under controlled conditions: documented instructions, in-process controls, approval of processes and equipment, and criteria for workmanship. Ensure processes are monitored and controlled. Guarantee an effective way of monitoring processes. Ensure that guidelines are consistently being followed.

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Industries

Automotive
Financial Services
Energy & Utilities
Food & Beverage
Manufacturing
Public Sector & Associations
High-tech
Healthcare
Pharmaceuticals & Biotechnology

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